Sales for Swiss B2B Tech Startups

Dear Swiss B2B Tech Startup Founder, 

All right, here I will go over how you can achieve Product-Market-Fit faster and profitably gain more customers with the limited resources you have.

Your main job as a Startup Founder is to figure out Product-Market-Fit and scale market traction before running out of money. 90% of startups unfortunately fail at that. The reason for failure is usually NOT that your product is not technically great or that you do not work hard to succeed. 

It is much more often the inability to profitably grow revenue and gain market traction as promised to investors in the famous “hockey stick business plan” because you either fail to not attract, close or keep enough customers fast enough.

The thing is this: Switzerland does not have the sales culture, education, and mindset you get in North America. Especially technical B2B Sales is not a skill set you learn even at great business universities (can confirm after 5 years at one) or in management consulting (can confirm as well). This makes it very hard to find great sales talent who think but also execute like entrepreneurs.

So when I joined a Swiss Venture Capital-backed Machine Learning startup as their 1st business employee, I knew some things about sales from selling for an NGO on the street, selling the last Tesla Roadsters in the early Tesla days and selling high-ticket deals at Accenture.

However, I figured out quickly that B2B Tech sales in a Startup without a big brand, customer base and rucksack of sales materials is much harder than to get the job done for a large company. But that is the reality for any B2B Tech Startup: Hunt your first 10 customers - and then more - without a rock-solid business model, track record, professional sales team and ample financial means.

Together with the Founder & CEO of onedot.com, I established the Onedot brand from scratch in the market after rebranding in 2017, transformed Onedot from a project-based service to a product-based subscription model and increased sales by 260% and customer base by 150% over 2 years. But honestly, I could have done a lot of things a lot smarter, quicker, and with less pain along the way. 

My personal mission is therefore to help as many Swiss B2B Tech Startups to succeed and change our world for the better. Identifying Sales as the single biggest point of failure triggered me to found https://hartmannventures.com/ to help startup founders with in person sales enablement so you can speed up your learning curve and therewith profitable revenue generation.

Judging by 20+ customers and CHF 100’000 bookings within 6 months after foundation, it seems Product-Market-Fit is there and I will continue to help great founders to build the company they set out for. The reason this works out is this:

Traditional sales coaches are very expensive and their material usually focuses on established businesses with proven business models that are (way) past finding Product-Market-Fit. Startup people, however, often talk a lot about exit strategies, growth hacking and lean startup, but lack the hardcore B2B sales knowledge, experience, and mindset. So B2B Sales for Tech Startups is hard but crucial to succeed.

You therefore need resources and support from people able to merge both the sales and the startup world. Here are a few pragmatic resources to get you started on that: https://thesalesplaybook.io/start

So what you need to succeed is this:

1. Identify a relevant and urgent problem to solve
2. Figure out a process how to reach Product-Market fit fast
3. Win your first 10 customers - and then your first 50, and so on
4. Set your startup up for scalable sales

So this leaves you with a few options as a Founder:

• You try to do everything yourself. But you are already juggling strategy, product development, admin, hiring and fundraising
• You hire an expensive senior sales guy for CHF 150’000+ per year who knows his stuff. But that person is rarely as hungry and hands-on as you need that early employee to be
• You hire an affordable junior sales guy who is hungry and hands-on. But without your or external support will struggle to ramp-up sales quickly and set your startup up for a scalable sales organisation

Or you can work with https://hartmannventures.com/ and get the entrepreneurial sales support to set you up for sales success in days instead of months.

Again, this is for No Bullshit Entrepreneurs of Swiss B2B Tech Startups who sincerely strive to solve a real-world problem and trying to scale their business, but struggle to fill their sales pipeline, convert and win customers and keep them. Here are some of our 20+ Swiss B2B Tech Startups speeding up their company growth by working with me: https://hartmannventures.com/success-stories/ 

This is NOT for people that are after exit strategy before revenue, investors before customers and ego and fame before tackling real problems.

So here is what will happen when you work with me:

• You will build your sales story to improve your conversion.
• You will understand how to shorten long sales cycles and close key opportunities.
• You will learn how to industrialize your sales process to enable scalable growth.
• You will get an actionable sales action that you can implement within 4 weeks.
• You can finally get rid of people not calling you back and not knowing why.
• You can forget about painting PowerPoint slides instead of focusing on sales.
• You will feel empowered to build sales and confident that you will succeed.

So how does it work?

Before, when you wanted to get access to actionable sales expertise, you would have to hire somebody full-time. But now, you can get entrepreneurial sales support at the time you need it. Flexible. Affordable. No Bullshit.

Before, when you wanted to gain new sales knowledge or actionable sales tools, you needed to read countless books and watch a ton of YouTube videos. But now, you can tap into a knowledge base of somebody who did this work for you. To give you 2 examples: 

• Sell more effectively with these Sales Rules: https://thesalesplaybook.io/salesrules
• Negotiate better with actionable insights: https://thesalesplaybook.io/negotiation

Before, when you wanted to get everybody to reach the same understanding on their ideal customer, how they do sales and why the business even exists, that was pretty much impossible. But now, you can collaborate across the whole organization, fully focus on closing great deals and onboard new employees faster with https://thesalesplaybook.io/

Now if you wanted to get this job done before working with me, it would cost you months of runway, the hiring of an expensive senior sales guy or hiring sales trainers focused on established businesses. 

Working with me will cost you less than CHF 10’000, in case of just using https://thesalesplaybook.io even less than CHF 1’000 per year. So if you close just 1 B2B deal more this year because of this tool, you get an ROI of >10x. In addition, you gain time savings on time until product-market-fit, employee onboarding, and communications in sales. 

Here’s what you get: 

• In-Person Sales Enablement. This will allow you to speed up sales within days.
• Actionable Templates. This will allow you to structure your sales approach.  
• Collaboration Platform. This will allow you to collaborate better and more consistent.
• Knowledge. This will allow you to close deals instead of reading books.

All you need to do is sign up for a free trial on https://thesalesplaybook.io/ or write me an email to [email protected] and I will be in touch shortly.